Saturday was the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. Chances…
Saturday was the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. Chances for seeing the full moon that night were not good, the weather people on TV were saying. I didn’t have any plans in particular until Little P called up and invited me over to his place for a family barbeque. I took a taxi over, passing a garbage-collecting frenzy, and found the entire P family gathered around a small charcoal barbeque placed in the alley in front of their home, just out of the way of the occasional passing car. The smells of beef, pork, chicken, green peppers, chicken hearts, squid, beans and corn on the cob filled the air. The sky was murky, no moon to be seen. I took a picture in the stainless-steel door to commemorate the event.
A few other guests arrived, some of whom I knew, some whom I’d never seen before. One fellow, a bloke from London named Sebastian, turned out to be another former cameraman. He’s here for a year studying Chinese on a scholarship at Shi-da. Little P’s little sister was prancing up and down the alley in what looked like the Russian sailor’s dance. She was going to be a ballerina, she said. She’s about 9. Occasionally Grandmother P would come out and frown at us. Later on, Papa P and Auntie P toasted us inside with Cinnemon and Gengseng wine, interspersed with Oolong tea. I practiced my Taiwanese with Papa P and another relative whose name I didn’t catch. It might have had something to do with the fact that said relative had only one tooth, the unfortunate placement of which confounded my attempts to understand his speech.
After the barbeque Little P, friend Bonnie, Sebastian and I went to 45, which seemed relatively gangster-free. I didn’t trust it to stay that way, though, so we headed over to Fresh, where I sat out on the rooftop balcony drinking red wine and finally caught a glimpse of the moon through the clouds, which supposedly is good luck.
I must have still been drunk when I finally managed to pull my hungover self out of bed this morning, as instead of doing anything useful or even sane, I walked over to the Jianguo Flower, picked out one of the many stray kittens they had on display there, and brought it home with me. It’s a trial kitten, to see if it takes to me, and vice-versa. Unfortunately, upon its release within the confines of my apartment, the black, white and orange animal immediately bolted to the nearest nook and hid, and I haven’t seen it since. I put out some food and water, set up a litter box, but it still won’t come out. It’s hiding behind my computer at the moment, hopefully not urinating into the circuitry. The cat websites say this is normal. We’ll see. If Trial Kitten and I cannot come to some sort of understanding by next weekend, I will consider the trial a failure and return it to the flower market. If it has, and it has refrained from destroying my apartment and eating my turtles, I might consider letting it stay. The horrors of Dean’s Evil Cat and the Ratbastard’s silent overlord Textured Cat Protein have made me wary to the dangers of cat-ownership, however, and I don’t intend to take any malarky from this cat.